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Twitter 911

In June of 2011, I spoke at the inaugural UCLA TEDx, hastily putting together a talk (“Can Twitter Save Lives?“) that demonstrated my despair over the Japan Disasters, and my encouragement for us to seriously consider twitter as a conduit for emergency response. Now, exactly two years after the disasters, Japan has finally acknowledged social media as an official medium for 911 calls (it is 119 in Japan). Today, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (総務省消防庁) announced their plans to roll this service out experimentally, starting this summer. While it is primarily aimed at those with people with disabilities, I can’t hep but think that this is a step in the right direction, and that many of us would find twittering 911 more intuitive than dialing 911. I would encourage all of us to geo-enable our tweets in times of crisis.